Life is life and fun is fun, but it gets so quiet when the goldfish die.

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Unripe melon salad

Karen gave us some rasberry canes in the late spring. I chose to plant them in one corner of the garden where I had previously dug a hole for compost (since we had more veg and fruit waste than our worms could consume.) Lo and behold we got a slew of volunteers from the seeds in the compost hole, which ended up competing with the rasberry canes. The volunteers included
a) a yellow cherry tomato; b) cherokee tomato (green and red stripes); c) a fennel; and d) a ground vine which I thought was some sort of squash but turned out to be melon.

I love fennel, but unfortunately that puppy was so deep I couldn’t dig it out. Plus, in the process I killed one of the rasberry canes. Sigh.

The squash-melon was a funny story. I’d picked one green, and cooked them in soup, since I though it was a vegetable-type melon. But the seed structure inside was more like a sweet/fruit-type melon. It wasn’t until we gave one that was sort of ripe to Truc, who let it sit on her counter further, that we figured out it was a fruit melon.

Unfortunately we had already picked two green ones, and stored them in the frige (so they can’t ripen further.) I guess I could have still made them into soup. But I decided to make cut one of them into cubes, and use them like cucumber and make it into a Thai-style salad. Which essentially means a dressing of fish sauce, chili, lime juice, salt, sugar and garlic. It’s fat free! For texture, I added cashews and dried shrimp, and diced cha-siu (which I’d defrosted by mistake, thinking it was a lump of beef.) Everything gets tossed together, and it tastes pretty good